Give Consumers What They Want from Online Travel Agencies

The travel booking marketplace is highly competitive. Travelers can book directly from hotels and airlines as well as using the services of a real world or online travel agent. The latest report from Phocuswright shows that online booking is close to beating out offline options, with Europe going 52% online this year and the US at 45%.

As in any business, gaining and keeping those online customers means giving them what they want. The report gives insight into how and consumers make their online purchasing decisions; online travel agencies can leverage to help boost their business.

1. The major reason for booking with online travel agencies is that the website is easy to use. Travel purchases are among the most expensive routine purchases customers make, and there’s a lot of information they need to consider when making the buying decision, so it’s no surprise that nearly half the survey respondents gave an easy-to-use website as the major reason for booking through an online travel agency.

Agencies need to continue to find ways to make their site easy for customers to use, particularly on mobile platforms where small screens make handling large amounts of information difficult. Help your customers easily compare their options by building interfaces that support smart searches and understand the customer’s preferences to present the most relevant results first.

2. Consumers rely on online resources for destination selection. Because travel purchases are big expenses, travelers do a lot of research before making their booking. They rely on online resources for the information, including reviews, that helps them make up their minds. Their needs for help are both big and little: choosing a destination, flight, hotel and the daily activities and excursions that fill out their trip.

Because of this, resources and services that help consumers find the information they need to make decisions and help plan their entire trip by building a daily itinerary will let consumers envision themselves on their travel. Help consumers both drill down into details and expand searches to bring in related information so they get both the broad picture and the specific information they want.

3. Travelers are looking for deals. For 30% of the survey respondents, the perception that online travel agencies offered the best prices drove their decision to book there. Offering bundles and packages hides the detailed component prices, leading customers to view them as better values than when booking on hotel sites directly.

The ability to easily compare prices on their different options is another factor that drives online customers to online travel agencies rather than making visits to multiple hotel or airline sites.

The big challenge for online travel agencies is that providing all of these features requires presenting more and more information, potentially on smaller screens. Companies will need to rapidly incorporate technical advances in analytics to reduce the large datasets of potential trips to the ones that are most relevant to the current consumer and keep the sites fast as they work with ever more data. Interfaces will need to be designed to highlight the products that best fit the customer’s stated needs and preferences, while allowing them easily to search and explore alternatives that meet their unstated needs.

Managing technology budgets to give appropriate attention to both the front end and back office operations will be important for online travel agencies to continue to succeed. Although the front end is what draws in business, backend technology is equally important to ensure that the post-purchase process leaves customers and suppliers happy. Streamlining those back end operations through payment automation will free a business to invest dollars, resources, and management attention to creating front ends that will continue to attract customers.